Joe Murphy » Questions

Question: Newspapers and the monopoly mentality

Joe — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 15:11:47 +0000

Update: Sorry about the spam posted with this entry on the RSS feed.

Someone wrote this on an article about Sam Zell and newspapers: “The biggest single thing holding [newspapers] back right now is the monopoly mentality that pervades sales, marketing and editorial at most big papers.”

Do you agree?

Question of the every-so-often: Got any “charging-for-content” angles you think might work?

Joe — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 04:16:45 +0000

As in, got any “charging-for-content” angles you think might work? Extra points if it has worked before. Extra extra points for market research.

I’ve got one angle, it’s not very good but it’s what I had in my head tonight: Find out who’s downloading and saving the articles you publish on your site. Groups and organizations do this — often they’re government orgs, putting together information for their employees. Your news org doesn’t get anything when they’re saving your stuff to their servers, but, if your news org provided a service that put this news together for them on your site, and charged for that service, those organizations wouldn’t have to spend the time looking for that data, and your news org wouldn’t lose the page views to the people pulling your content for their own uses.

Here’s a better riff on the “news concierge” angle (because, honestly, who knows the information you publish better than you do?): Law firms often have to look up specific information. Many times they call newsrooms looking for that information online. What are newsrooms doing answering those phone calls for free? No, what we need is an information retainer fee. No questions asked or answered until the law firm (or, heck, pr firm) pays up. This is a service a newsroom library could provide.

Question of the Quarter: Explain a database in three sentences to your eight-year-old nephew.

Joe — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 02:30:52 +0000

Saw this question on the internets and couldn’t resist. So as not to taint your thought process, I will write my answer in white, below, and you can mouse over it to see it if you so choose.

A database is like a bunch of egg cartons stacked right on top of each other. Each of the egg-holders in the carton has a name, and so does each egg. The egg names sometime change.

Question: What are some novel ways to get the newsroom involved in the web site?

Joe — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 16:02:31 +0000

I’ve seen it countless times: Reporter wants to help out online. Reporter gets the okay to start blogging. Reporter blogs for a few weeks. Without any comments, or any idea that anybody’s really reading, reporter quits the blog.

Or, there’s video. Or audio. Reporter shoots video, hands it off to online team. Neither online team or reporter have time to produce video. Video goes nowhere.

By my count there are currently six active ways the newsroom participates online:

Getting online breaking news stories
Writing blogs
Shooting video
Recording audio
Building photo galleries
Making interactive graphics

And some of these turn out pretty awesome. The Denver Post’s graphics department produced print-out cut-up fold-together dolls for the majority of the Colorado Rockies baseball team through the course of the Rockies’ World Series run. Including one for the Rockies’ mascot, a triceratops.

But there’s gotta be more. What are some novel one-off ways to get the newsroom involved online? What are some new ways to get newsroom continually participating online?

Question: What local actions can online newspapers help facilitate?

Joe — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 13:52:45 +0000

Backfence, the hyperlocal startup that couldn’t, is closing its doors. Some newspapers continue testing the interactive online-community waters. What’s the big picture here? “Action.” The action-oriented internet. One thing the internet does well is make previously difficult actions much easier. Newspaper-dot-coms haven’t quite clued into this, which is why articles are still the primary way that newspapers publish content online.

There’s a world of local actions that newspapers, with their breadth and depth of information, can facilitate. Right now most newspaper-dot-coms allow you to view articles, photos, video, calendar events and classifieds. You can vote in online polls. You can (probably) comment on articles.

What other actions (probably “local” actions) would suit a newspaper-dot-com?

Question: How have online publishers innovated with local community?

Joe — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 13:53:21 +0000

Each time I see that last question I wrote I dislike it more. Out with bad ideas, in with new ones (and give the new ones a couple weeks until they’re allowed to be called bad).

This question aims at the idea that newspapers are in a unique place online. No other legacy medium publishes so many words and letters online (if you doubt words are the main way communication flows on the internet, take another look at your monitor). What other forms of publishing are tied to one place on the map? Yellow pages, local television (tv news and cable access), some magazines and local radio. Which of those forms is most capable of harnessing local communities? Well, that remains to be seen.

So here’s the question: How have online publishers innovated with local community?

Question: What’s the lowest-hanging fruit for local news sites?

Joe — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 14:57:02 +0000

There’s plenty of work to be done on the local web. There’s a lot of potential in local / hyperlocal news. What’s the lowest-hanging fruit on the local news site? (Sure, this depends on the situation / market / tv-radio-newspaper angle, but there are plenty that are way too applicable to all)

Here’s one I see…

Kill the cut-and-paste, and make plans to put away the shovel. Fixing workflow on the shovelware parts of news production will save hours every week — hours that could be spent synthesizing and organizing your information better. Coming up with a plan to publish the newspaper content in a non-article manner will get your newsroom thinking about ways the internet is different than the printed page.

p.s. This is the second “Question of the Quarter” here — you can read / respond to the first one, What do you wish your local online news source provided?, here.

Question: What do you wish your local online news source provided

Joe — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 08:03:53 +0000

So, this is one of the conversation-building projects on this blog: The Open-Ended Question. While it may be optimistic to hope for much response here, being a new blog that’s not even read by my parents (yet), the wonder of blogs is that you can answer this question a month or a year from now, and your answer will still matter.

The question here is “What (information / functionality / features) do you wish your local online news source provided?” The partner to this question is “What do you love about the information / functionality / features that your local online news source provides?”

Fire away.